Having found success in video games and a hugely popular Netflix series, The Witcher franchise is now on the hunt for the coin Pokémon GO has earned in location-based augented reality mobile games.
While most established media brands are satisfied with copying Pokémon GO to jump into augmented reality gaming, at least one property is taking a slightly different approach.
If you need to know whether you are really a Hufflepuff or a Gryffindor, then it's time to get yourself an augmented reality sorting hat.
Mixed reviews of Magic Leap One aside, it would be hard to deny that Magic Leap has had a big year. And the AR unicorn isn't coasting to the finish line, with a number of new apps dropping and prescription frames finally arriving to bring relief to those who wear eyeglasses.
The recent announcement of a $480 million US Army contract awarded to Microsoft over Magic Leap for supplying 100,000 augmented reality headsets shows just a how lucrative the enterprise (and government) sector can be for AR.
While augmented reality experiences can already appear to be magical, particularly to the uninitiated, one developer is doubling down on its mystical potential for the ever-popular Magic: The Gathering card game.
Advertisers must love when their commercials go viral. Take for instance the Esurance commercial where an elderly woman completely misunderstands Facebook jargon.
Beware: After a new caucus — the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Technologies for the 115th Congress — formed in the US House of Representatives, the government has decided to go after all mixed reality head-mounted displays. The HoloLens, Magic Leap — nothing is safe anymore.
Facebook announced at its F8 Developer's Conference on April 12th that, in addition to the VR-ready Oculus Rift we have today, it plans to bring Augmented Reality (AR) into the fold of their social machine.
While the long-awaited HoloLens 2 officially arrived this week, details leaked about another, arguably longer-awaited AR headset, the fabled wearable from Apple, and a previously undisclosed partner assisting the Cupertino-based company with the hardware.
Smartglasses are the future of augmented reality, and Samsung is betting on waveguide maker DigiLens to emerge as a leader in the growing AR wearable industry.
While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents.
Location services provider Mapbox is expanding the reach of its augmented reality development capabilities to include apps for automobiles as well as smartphone navigation.
Designing and manufacturing waveguides for smartglasses is a complex process, but DigiLens wants us to know that they have a software solution that partially solves that problem.
This time last year, we got our first taste of what mobile app developers could do in augmented reality with Apple's ARKit. Most people had never heard of Animojis. Google's AR platform was still Tango. Snapchat introduced its World Lens AR experiences. Most mobile AR experiences existing in the wild were marker-based offerings from the likes of Blippar and Zappar or generic Pokémon GO knock-offs.
After parting ways with Papa John's, the National Football League has drafted Pizza Hut as its official pizza purveyor, and the company has hit the field with an augmented reality game to entertain hungry football fans.
Apple CEO Tim Cook's most recent tech prophecy is that "AR will change everything." And now, that includes Apple's own website.
Just in time for a new season of professional basketball, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has released a new app for iPhones and iPads built on ARKit that turns your driveway into a basketball court.
The Sharknado franchise is, somehow, releasing a fifth movie "Sharknado 5: Global Swarming" (groan) next month. In anticipation of the film's release, the company has decided to create an augmented reality mobile game called, prepare yourself, "Sharknado: ShARkmented Reality".
The hunt for the mixed reality use-case that wins over consumers' hearts and creates a critical mass is a problem every developer would love to solve. Not only would they find themselves rich and famous seemingly overnight, but they would also end up making one of the various possible hardware solutions a viable place for other developers to put their time and energy.
While augmented reality is mostly in the minds of consumers in the form of Pokémon GO, AR has been popular behind the scenes, with AR companies marketing it as a tool to help business operations become more efficient. This business-to-business market is the target of the new app DOTTYAR, which "provides 3D visualization tools for augmented reality viewers."
Apple recently scored a patent (number 9,488,488) to create augmented reality maps, hinting at possible AR integration into the iOS Maps application for iPhone. Does this mean we'll be seeing super visionary projections of places in the app in the near future? Maybe.
A virtual design and construction services firm has built an augmented reality application that uses the Microsoft HoloLens to improve the efficiency of quality control on construction sites.
Earlier this week, a mysterious tweet appeared on the HTC Twitter account of a picture containing the letter "U" topped with a tiny "for" and the date "01.12.2017" at the bottom. It is a pretty solid teaser, but for a company that has had a solid year with their Vive virtual reality headset, and all of the other technological appendages they have, it seems a bit ominous for them.
Imagine sitting on your patio, scrolling through your phone's photos, reminiscing about the past. Now imagine being able to see those photos floating in the air, at the exact vantage point from where they were taken a year ago.
It looks like Microsoft will finally make good on its promise to bring Minecraft to augmented reality, as foreshadowed via a HoloLens demo in 2015.
With barely a whisper of augmented reality during the first day of its developer's conference, Samsung came out swinging on day two with the introduction of its version of the AR cloud and a partnership with Wacom that turns Samsung's S-Pen into an augmented reality magic wand.
Regal Cinema's augmented reality magazine Moviebill enjoyed a big debut in April and it has its sights set on an even bigger (virtually) outing with its next edition.
One of the most popular mobile games out there for kids has added an augmented reality mode that brings the titular character into the real world.
A report from app data firm Sensor Tower reveals that more than 13 million ARKit apps have been installed on iPhones and iPads within the first six months since the toolkit launched with iOS 11.
Ever since the announcement of The Walking Dead: Our World game last fall, publisher AMC and developer Next Games have been quiet about the title. Almost too quiet.
Next to things like natural disasters and disease, the specter of war is one of the only things that threatens to derail the 21st century's long stretch of technological innovation. Now a new app is using augmented reality to remind us of that by focusing on those most impacted by war — children.
Moviegoers who arrive at the theater early are no longer a captive audience for the ads, trivia, and miscellaneous content that precede the movie trailers than run before the feature presentation, as the ubiquity of the smartphone has become the preferred distraction for early birds at the theater.
If you bought your first mobile phone in the early-to-mid-2000s, there's a good chance that it was a Nokia and it had the game Snake preinstalled.
One of the byproducts of the success of Pokémon Go was the viral images that made the rounds on social media of people putting Pikachus, Charmanders, and their brethren in compromising positions. Snapchat has a similar claim to fame, most recently with the inexplicable popularity of the dancing hotdog.
Augmented reality developer Blippar has created a new visual positioning service based on computer vision that is two times more accurate than GPS in urban locales.
Those of us that work with or around augmented and mixed reality have seen a powerful shift in the last year as the popularity and interest have grown in the field. With Microsoft's HoloLens release, the popularity of Pokémon GO, and the constant rumor mill known as Magic Leap, the terms augmented reality and mixed reality have started to become a part of the modern vernacular more and more each passing day.
Could the technology that powers games like Pokémon GO be used for surgery in the near future? Researchers at the University of Maryland think so.
Sky Zhou, also know as Matrix Inception on YouTube, is no stranger here on NextReality. We loved his Pokémon concept game for HoloLens, as well as his D3D Keyboard that lets HoloLens users leave notes around the house. He just can't seem to stop creating cool mixed reality apps, and he's already got another one in the works.
Dutch police are using a system very similar to Pokémon GO on smartphones, but they aren't walking around trying to catch little pocket monsters. The purpose of this system is to give augmented reality help to first responders who may be less qualified to work a fresh crime scene. If successful, the idea of a contaminated crime scene could be a thing of the past.
